Justin Colson

Here are some photos from last year’s course: the only summer school group ever known to work through the lunch breaks #MedievalSky #Manuscripts @ies-sas.bsky.social @senatehouselib.bsky.social

🚂 Joy on the Southbank, misery in the Square Mile. Here’s what the City of London’s much vaunted ‘retrofit-first’ policy looks like in reality, as planning permission was granted this week for the £1.2 billion demolition of Liverpool Street Station.

🧵 Scroll down for 8 damning before / after views

The AI Takeover Is Not Inevitable: Now Is the Time to Resist "Studying history, we know that nothing is inevitable."

Over the next few weeks, the NACBS blog will feature a series of pieces on artificial intelligence. Check out the opening essay by @amywb.bsky.social and stay tuned for more!

www.nacbs.org/post/the-ai-...

Skills Training in Archival Research (STAR) Workshop Join us for a hands-on workshop designed to help postgraduate students and researchers make the most of archival collections.

We have more Skills Training in Archival Research (STAR) workshops coming up!

Join staff at The London Archives for a hands-on workshop designed to help postgrad students and researchers make the most of archival collections.

📍 The London Archives
📅 1 April + 3 June
🕛️ 1-4:30pm

Boston ("the stump", three square storeys topped with an flyer-buttressed "lantern" octagon), Coventry (the bombed-out church which had been made a cathedral in 1918, four square stories carrying a flyer-buttressed octagon with a spire) and Cirencester (model from Youtube user CotswoldDrone, articulated as three stories, although the middle storey could be argued as two)

W towers of parish churches of Boston (1420s-1510s), St Michael Coventry (1370s-1440s) and Cirencester (1400s-20s).
Latter was built with squinches to take an octagonal stage/spire but was aborted after they had to put massive flyers through the aisles to stop the W side falling apart from thrust.

Exploring the itineraries of King Edward I 🤓

Network Rail + ACME’s latest plans are on the planning portal at the City of London. The way to combat this is to object by 9th February on that planning portal. Our easy Guide to writing your own objection is on the link on our bio. Along with a link to our fundraiser. #SaveLiverpoolStreetStation

For anyone interested in our 18-month post in British Studies please follow the link below. @ihr.bsky.social

www.jobs.london.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

#WarSHum12 This is a video recording of a lecture "Deep Mapping in Practice: ‘Layers of London’ and Participatory Experiential Mapping" delivered by Justing…

Presentation I gave for the Warsaw Spatial Humanities Seminar on Layers of London @layersoflondon.bsky.social as an example of applied Deep Mapping is now live on Vimeo vimeo.com/1161792658

I just happened to stumble across this blog from Cory Doctorow from last September that resonated with your final point there: pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/e... I'm sure it is true that there is a hell of a lot of room for optimisation of models once the bubble bursts and more is open sourced ...

Tech firms have over-leveraged themselves to the point where AI is "too big to fail" - the only way they can repay their investments is if we all become dependent on LLMs for everything. But it simply isn't suited to most tasks. Don't buy the hype, but DO use AI where it is the right tool! (9/9)

This is a great example of the nature of a Language Model - wonderful at dealing with patterns and the logic of a document - linguistic structure! But it simply doesn't deal with *knowledge* or *facts*, and asking it to do that is intrinsically going against the grain of how it is structured (8/9)

That really highlights what's going on. Internal reasoning within a text, and basic cross referencing (like King's reigns) play to the strengths of an LLM - a Language Model. But asking it show sources highlights the weaknesses - it has, at best, done a traditional search retrospectively! (7/9)

Gemini has even cited our very own @layersoflondon.bsky.social - but that is just as much of a tell that this is all fake as the random Ealing church website! Layers is a great for medieval parishes, but I'm pretty sure that Gemini's visual reasoning can't interpret those complex map overlays (6/9)

Asking Gemini to annotate the transcription also got great results, and certainly showed reasoning. The identification of 'church of St Benedict' as St Benet Sherehog is particularly impressive - so I asked how? The logic is correct. Where it all goes wrong is in the citations ... (5/9)

Inspired by Humphries' blog, we used Gemini Pro 3.5 Preview in Google AI Studio, and began uploading and prompting for transcription into JSON and Markdown formats, with great results! (better than volunteers...) Then we started to try the annotation and reasoning that the blog highlighted (4/9)

We hold the 'Great Wall of Cheapside', a vast set of handwritten index cards created by Derek Keene and his team during the 1980s and 90s, summarising medieval and early modern City of London property deeds. Narratives of each location were published but the cards contain a wealth of names etc (3/9)

The Sugar Loaf Test: How an 18th-Century Ledger Reveals Gemini 3.0’s Emergent Reasoning A deep dive into my experience testing the new Gemini 3.0 Pro and the growing evidence I’ve seen for emergent neuro-symbolic reasoning.

There was a flurry of interest a few months ago in response to Mark Humphries' article on using Google Gemini 3.5 Pro Preview for transcribing a C18th commercial ledger generativehistory.substack.com/p/the-sugar-... So at @chppc.bsky.social we decided to have an experiment (2/9)

Scan of 1980s handwritten index card which calendars a medieval property deed

Screenshot of JSON annotated transcription of medieval property deed

🧵amazing results we've had using Gemini #AI to work with #Medieval #London primary sources: but also clear illustrations of how limited and flawed LLMs are as research tools. Transcriptions from 1980s handwritten index cards, and annotations were next to perfect, but flaws exposed in process (1/9)

1783 map of London showing Hackney Coach fares. Information in the IHR Library catalogue: https://search.libraries.london.ac.uk/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991009306329709266&context=L&vid=44SHL_INST:IHR&lang=en&search_scope=IHR_ONLY&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=IHR&query=any,contains,hackney%20coach%20fares&offset=10

Detail of the map, listing fares between locations. This map was on display last week at our Discovery Course on 'Historic Maps: Interpreting Stories of Place' - participants enjoyed handling this and other fascinating materials from the IHR collection. If you're interested in exploring upcoming Discovery Courses and training, visit the IHR website! https://www.history.ac.uk/

Catching an Uber, #Bridgerton style? This remarkable 1783 pocket #map of #London, in the collection of @ihrlibrary.bsky.social, shows the Hackney Coach fare between key destinations in the city. A great guide to getting around - and avoiding getting ripped off! More info in AltText.

Gen A.I. barons want us talkinge alone on our phones to a demon thei created, and not goinge places and being wyth each othir yn art and joy and communitye. Thei want cinemas to shut downe and broadwaye to go darke. Thei want wryteres to stop writinge. Thei want to build hell and have us pay for it.

Dr Justin Colson welcomes participants

Treasures and key reading from the library

Historic maps and other materials from the library

Great to see our new IHR Discovery Course on 'Historic Maps: Interpreting Stories of Place', led by @justincolson.bsky.social, getting off to a brilliant start this morning. A full room, lots of treasures from @ihrlibrary.bsky.social, + a fascinating few days of lectures, workshops and visits ahead!

I've just submitted my objection to the Liverpool Street planning application - please add your voices! Regular user of the station, I know l that claimed need for redevelopment is nonsense - the concourse is less crowded now that the Elizabeth line is open, but total numbers being used to deceive!

Our new short courses are a great way to learn about using different kinds of sources for researching and writing history. Whether you're researching one place, or something broader, this is the ideal introduction to using the built environment in history!

Final day for bookings for my Historic Maps course next week! We'll explore the history of surveying and cartography, colonial map making and tithe maps. We'll also get hands on with physical and digital historic map collections!

Also @neilstewart.bsky.social and Rebecca from the IHR's UoL cup winning quiz team!

The cover of a red hardback book. The title, in red on a cream label is ‘Towcester Hundred’

A sample page from a book showing text in two columns and an image of a townscape. Centre a church tower with ivy clad two storey brick building to the left and Victorian town hall to the right.

A facing page spread with map in black and white to the left and two column text to the right.

What’s this? A second new book in two days?

Towcester Hundred is the eighth VCH volume for Northamptonshire, including the town of Towcester and its rural neighbours.

Available soon from @boydellandbrewer.bsky.social and @ihrlibrary.bsky.social.

#Skystorians #LocalHistory

An Oral B electric toothbrush which has been disassembled

It really shouldn't be so difficult to change a battery in a toothbrush! When this Oral B brush stopped holding charge, I was determined not to give in to planned obsolescence. Took a £5 NiMH battery, and re-soldering 9 joints - clearly designed deliberately to discourage you from sustainability!

Astonishing. The development of ship design and capacity is something our analysis of London's medieval customs accounts may illuminate. @justincolson.bsky.social @ebenbow.bsky.social @histgrove.bsky.social

Oh I'm sure London Haberdashers supplied Colchester chapmen! But Colchester definitely had its own regular shipping with Cologne. Stuart Jenks (whose data we're using) has been finding interesting stuff in Colchester court books re: German merchants suing rural weavers for debts - so direct trade